Some Earthquakes Player Statistics For 2015

Last year I started tracking the games played by each Quakes player, including reasons for absence, in a spreadsheet. The idea was to help me visualize player churn. I started it in the middle of the year, so some of the injury data was no longer reliably available. I ended up getting a lot of it from reddit match threads.

For this year, however, I got to track it all year long, paying attention to injuries as the season went on. I also added more columns to track additional stats that I found interesting, including how many games a player started or was subbed into or out of. I thought it might be worthwhile to share some numbers from the spreadsheet. (Which is here if you’d like to see this year’s version.)

But special mention should go to Quincy Amarikwa, who played in every single game since he came to San Jose.

Least Used Players

To no one’s surprise, the least used player is Tomas Gomez, the backup backup goalkeeper. (I actually didn’t even have him on my spreadsheet until I went to write this article. Whoops.) David Bingham has been our rock between the posts this year, and didn’t play in three matches (one US Open Cup and two friendlies). In the three he sat out, Bryan Meredith stepped in. (Which makes Meredith #2 least used.) And considering the kind of goalkeeping talent we having coming out of the academy, I was not surprised at all to learn that we’d let Gomez go.

Here’s a list of the top ten least-used players, counting only games where the players were otherwise available and simply did not play (so not counting injuries, loans, callups, etc.):

Discipline

Only one player got suspended more than once, which was Victor Bernárdez, who got suspended both for a red card versus Chicago in March and for yellow card accumulation later in the season.

Three other players got suspended once for yellow card accumulation: Clarence Goodson, Marc Pelosi, and Aníbal Godoy. The latter two are particularly impressive because they arrived mid-season and only had 14 and 10 games, respectively, in which to earn those five yellows.

Jordan Stewart also picked up a suspension handed out by the MLS Disciplinary Committee.

Injuries

At various times, fifteen Quakes players missed games due to injury. Obviously the most games missed belongs to Mr. Goonie himself, Steven Lenhart, who was injured last season and spent all of this season trying to recover. Just behind him with 30 games missed for injury is our million-dollar star Innocent Emeghara, who ended up only playing in 7 games (missing one due to the aforementioned red card). In all, 15 players spent time on the injured list. Here are the top ten:

Although it’s a tremendous honor to represent your country, and having players who have the skill to represent at that level also brings honor to the team, it can be a little scary when you have so many important players who could all be out at the same time because MLS fails to respect the FIFA Calendar. Given how close the Quakes came to the playoffs in 2015, one wonders how much of an impact these missed games had on the team.

Summary

So there you have it. The team definitely solidified in 2015, but there’s clearly some more work to be done, and it seems that Kinnear and his staff are on top of it. It’ll be interesting to see what other new signings come in before the start of the 2016 season.